Heath's "Ethnography in Education: Defining the Essential"

Ethnography derives from anthropology because it studies "human behavior in cross-cultural perspective" (33).

What are the essentials of ethnograhpy? It "describes the ways of living of a social group." This concept coincides with Egan-Robertson and Willet's description of the goal of ethnography.

"By becoming a participant in the social group, an ethnographer attempts to record and describe the overt, manifest, and explicit behaviors and values and tangible items of culture," state Heath.

My question is: If the goal is to be a non-judgmental researcher, how can an ethnographer possibly be objective in his/her description, selection, and interpretation of data? How can we as humans refrain from bringing in our own value systems into our understanding of a group's way of doing things? How is that possible?

Another point Heath makes is that "culture is holistic and ethnographers place their descriptions in the context of larger purposes" (34).

Yes, but how can a local communitiy's way of living or doing things be a representation of an entire culture? What about cultures within a culture? Subcultures within a community?